Letters: Should amnesty be an option for Snowden?

HUNTINGTON BEACH: Jim Higgins: The Register editorial, “Bringing Snowden home” [Jan. 5], arguing for clemency for Edward Snowden is an improvement over its previous plea for clemency based on the premise that clemency be granted “for no more leaks” [“Snowden:

Demonstrators with posters of NSA leaker Edward Snowden and the motto “Freedom instead of fear” for civil rights and data protection during the 30th Chaos Communication Congress (Bodo Marks photo).

Amnesty for no more leaks,” Editorial, Dec. 17]. The premise that clemency be granted in spite of committing a crime, if only the perpetrator stop committing that crime is specious. It's useless in this case since the damage has been done to our government's battle against terrorism using the tools of its surveillance expertise.

No doubt the world of good guys knows about the National Security Agency's efforts to curb terrorism, but so do the bad guys. Next to Sunday's editorial is a column by Robert Samuelson [“Trust a casuality of Snowden”] in which he writes, “If Americans think their privacy is dangerously diminished, there are remedies. They can turn off their PCs, toss their smartphones and smash their tablets.”

Unfortunately, the bad guys are probably doing exactly this. The reality is our comfortable lives may be impacted by NSA surveillance but no more so (and probably less) than TSA searches prior to boarding airlines.

As a nation we have come to recognize the threat to our way of living (and actual survival) and have accepted some interruptions to our previous lifestyles. But these are certainly not in conflict with the Fourth Amendment as recently determined by Judge William Pauley III in a New York District Court who cited a 1979 Supreme Court ruling (Smith v. Maryland).

Aligned with Judge Pauley's ruling, Samuelson writes, “People do not open Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts because they wish to shroud their lives in secrecy. They do not use online dating services or post videos on YouTube because they cherish their anonymity. The Internet is a vehicle for self-promotion, personal advertising and the pursuit of celebrity.”

The Register often reinforced its position for granting amnesty by making statements such as “we now know that the NSA has amassed dossiers on hundreds of millions of individuals in this country.” Samuelson's counterpoint states, “The reality is far more limited.”

The NSA is governed by legal restrictions. It does not examine the full database. It searches individual numbers only after it has been determined there's a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that a number might be linked to terrorist groups.

“Thousands of calls are caught in the dragnet; but the total is puny compared with the untold billions of annual calls. The Register is entitled to its opinion that Snowden is “neither hero or traitor,” but to suggest the “U.S. government should offer Snowden a path to clemency” is without merit. We are a nation of laws. Snowden violated the espionage laws.

If he wants to return to our country and stand trial to be judged by its citizens in our courts, then I am willing to accept whatever judgment is found. But to suggest that the Obama administration should usurp our due process of law by deciding innocence or guilt frightens me more that any perceived threat to my Fourth Amendment rights.

No forgiveness

SAN CLEMENTE: Ann Anderson: Why do we need Snowden? Is providing classified material to a foreign country or paper not traitorous?

By the very definition of traitor, he is one, and as far as I am concerned he should stay in Russia and see how it works its spying. How quickly he would have been put in jail or worse if it were the Russians he had betrayed. He should not be forgiven.

Does Snowden think we are the only country using electronic surveillance on certain people?

An era of ‘soft tyranny'

LAGUNA HILLS: Scott Ayers: In his column Jan. 6, “Curbing NSA's Orwellian Spying,” UC Irvine law school dean and Register columnist Erwin Chemerinsky condemns the NSA gathering of telephone information as “a serious threat to privacy and individual freedom” and that it is a “totalitarian characteristic” for the government to “so extensively monitor its citizens' activities.”

A news flash for Chemerinsky: the post office scans the face of every piece of first class mail; your drive to work is monitored by video cameras; the government knows about your real property; your divorces; your party affiliation and voting record; the birthplaces of your parents, spouse and children; your mortgage company, banks, and stock holdings; every employer and every wage you were ever paid; when you last bought Sudafed at Costco; every handgun you have owned; the breed of your dog; a recent photograph of your face; your automobiles; your military history (if you were privileged to serve); every international trip you have ever taken; and your friendly TSA or Border Patrol can scan your body when you depart and search your smartphone or laptop when you return home. And the Affordable Care Act? Privacy? Not so much.

Without subpoena, the government has monitored everyone's “health, finances and relationships” for decades.

It's nice that Chemerinsky is now indignant that privacy rights are “so extensively” under attack. Unfortunately, that “privacy bus” left the Constitution Avenue station a long time ago, and he missed it.

______

IRVINE: Daniel Barbeau: The last line of Erwin Chemerinsky's column struck me as painfully ironic. Concerning the NSA's domestic dragnet, he writes that “[i]t is characteristic of a totalitarian society, not a free one, for the government to so extensively monitor its citizens' activities.”

As the professor is a vocal and frequent cheerleader of Obamacare, one wonders why he warns of creeping totalitarianism through NSA collection of the Americans' phone records, but ignores dangers within government's expanded powers to monitor and coerce Americans through such programs as the Affordable Care Act.

I suppose that this sort of omission typifies the liberal doctrine of “soft tyranny.” As long as its societal engineering motives are supposedly enlightened, any means justify the ends. That, however, is an extremely dangerous path. Milton Freidman perhaps best highlighted such flawed thinking when he wrote, “[c]oncentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.” Let's not ignore his warning and apply that skeptical logic to all of our government's doings.

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